Items tagged with supercomputer

Cray's future "Cascade" supercomputer will be a veritable powerhouse featuring Intel's Xeon Phi coprocessors built with 22nm 3D tri-gate transistors and Nvidia Tesla GPUs based on the chip designer's next-generation Kepler architecture, the company announced. This is a major win for Nvidia, and the latest in a long series of validations that GPUs have their place in supercomputing platforms. "This is an exciting announcement for us, and for our customers, as it proves that we remain committed to our vision of integrating a range of advanced processing technologies into a single, scalable architecture,"...Read more...

If you've ever wanted to own your own supercomputer, now's your chance. Boutique system builder AVADirect announced what it claims is the first personal supercomputer workstation loaded to the gills with dual 8-core Intel Xeon processors, up to 192GB of memory, and support for up to four graphics cards. That's some serious horsepower, folks. AVADirect tapped EVGA to provide a pallet of Classified SR-X dual-socket 2011 motherboards to serve as the foundation for its personal supercomputer. Pricing starts at around $2,635 for a baseline configuration, which consists of: 2 x Xeon E5-2603 quad-core...Read more...

SC11 is going on this week in Seattle, and supercomputers are the main topic of conversation. NVIDIA just announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is deploying a Cray supercomputer accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, as part of the Blue Waters project to build one of the world's most powerful computer systems. Tesla GPUs will help enable NCSA to meet the mission of the Blue Waters project, which is to deploy a supercomputer capable of sustained performance of one petaflop on a diverse range of real-world...Read more...

Wondering if ARM-based chips are powerful enough for the real world? Here's your answer. NVIDIA has just unveiled a new prototype system with Tegra ARM CPUs and CUDA GPUs, and that system just so happens to be a supercomputer. The company has announced that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is developing a new hybrid supercomputer that, for the first time, uses energy-efficient, low-power NVIDIA Tegra ARM CPUs, together with high-performance NVIDIA CUDA GPUs. BSC is planning to develop the first large scale system based on this technology, with a near term goal of demonstrating two to five...Read more...

Business, and technology, is booming in China. No shock there. As the world soars past 7 billion people, the home to many of them is soaring to new heights in the supercomputer arena. China has just completed their first supercomputer based on Chinese-made microprocessors, with the announcement coming this week at a tech meeting held in Jinan. The new machine is called the Sunway BlueLight MPP, and it was officially installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan. A New York Times report mentions that it can perform around 1,000 trillion calculations per second, putting it...Read more...

How do you turn a Jaguar into a Titan? It's simple really -- just change its diet to include plenty of Tesla chips. That's what the Oak Ridge National Laboratory plans to do as it upgrades its Jaguar supercomputer with no less than 960 Tesla M2090 GPUs based on Nvidia's Fermi architecture, followed by a second upgrade that will include 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on Nvidia's Kepler architecture. After the upgrade effort is complete, the new Titan supercomputer will have the potential to deliver over 20 petaflops of peak performance. A Titan indeed. "All areas of science can benefit from this substantial...Read more...

Did you know that there's an actual place in the world called the San Diego Supercomputer Center? Let's just say you just found your next place of employment, huh? It sounds like a pretty awesome venue, and they just announced the launch of what is believed to be the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the U.S., specifically designed for researchers, students, academics, and industry users who require stable, secure, and cost-effective storage and sharing of digital information, including extremely large data sets. Michael Norman, director of SDSC, had this to say: "We believe that the...Read more...

The Chinese have been climbing up the supercomputing staircase for some years; the country's upgraded Tianhe-I system is currently in the lead out of the TOP500. Despite Tianhe-I's success, it may be the last supercomputer China builds using both Intel and NVIDIA parts. (The Tianhe-I originally used 2,560 Radeon 4870 X2 cards, these were later swapped out for NV Tesla M2050 boards.) According to Hu Wei, lead designer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's next TOP500 contender (the Dawning will run mostly, if not entirely, on Chinese-designed microprocessors. Chinese developers have...Read more...

Sorry humans, but it's time to welcome your new robot overlords. After last night's airing of Jeopardy, it's only a matter of time before our gadgets turn against us, perhaps led by Watson or some other equally intelligent creation. You see, Watson is the name given to IBM's supercomputer, which proved both faster and smarter than the two most decorated Jeopardy champions of all time. Watson, which is much too large to fit behind a podium, was represented by an avatar and fed the questions via text. This occurred at the same time Jeopardy host Alex Trebek read the questions out loud to Ken Jennings,...Read more...

It's sort of funny to think about how IBM has changed over the years. Remember when you either had an "IBM-compatible" PC or an Apple? Remember when ThinkPad meant IBM? The company has transformed a lot over the decades, and lately, they've really been on a supercomputer kick. IBM's Watson supercomputer will be on Jeopardy later in the month, representing a huge leap forward in artificial intelligence and speech technology. And now, IBM has landed a deal with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to "enable significant...Read more...

A game show with two award winners, a famed host, and a supercomputer as a contestant. What is Jeopardy? That's actually correct. Next month, Jeopardy will air a series of episodes with just two human contestants, and one human host. Brad Rutter, Alex Trebek and Ken Jennings will be joined by a rather unusual opponent and guest, an IBM-built supercomputer named Watson. Jennings and Rutter are two of Jeopardy's most winning players ever, while Watson has never actually played on-air before. How will the machine do? Will it embarrass itself? Or will it dominate the humans much like supercomputers...Read more...

NVIDIA isn't just a graphics company. Many only think of the company's GPU line, which is certainly their most forward segment in the industry. But they're also a software company, and they also make all sorts of other hardware (like the 3D Vision kit for example). They also operate in the high performance computing space. Recently, the Tesla Personal Supercomputer made its debut, and clearly the company has a mind to create even more robust supercomputer systems. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, just granted NVIDIA with a huge gift, and a huge responsibility....Read more...

Supercomputers are everywhere, but they hardly get the attention that they deserve. Hundreds of these huge machines churn out all sorts of data and analysis that many humans use in their everyday life, but most take it for granted. By and large, supercomputers have been "stale" and "boring" to average consumers. After all, you can't exactly buy and use your own supercomputer (at least not without tons of cash and a really good application), but Virginia Tech's new supercomputer is different. As the worlds of the CPU and GPU have collided over the years, the same thing now seems to be happening...Read more...

Supercomputers and mainframes can get somewhat overwhelming to the average consumer, but IBM's latest at least have a video to go along with them. The new contraption is called the zEnterprise mainframe server, which is a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. It's not only the most powerful and energy-efficient mainframe ever, but it could lead to interesting new usage models for consumer PCs. The new systems design combines IBM's new zEnterprise mainframe server with new technology--the...Read more...